I’ve yet to meet a gamer who doesn’t hold a special place in their heart for the hardware of yesteryear. Even those of us who gamed on PCs or Amigas love to wax lyrical about big boxes and trackball mice. Those formative experiences shape the adults we become, motivating us to walk the various paths we take through life. It won’t surprise you to learn that Stephen King spent his childhood watching horror movies at his local theatre, or that Gary Gygax had a lot of love for pulp and high fantasy fiction, long before he got into wargaming
This very human trait is no less evident when someone’s childhood is spent playing Sonic or Mario and while chiptunes, the affectionate nickname given to music that apes 8-bit and 16-bit sound chips, are certainly not a new thing, some of their proponents are taking the creation of new music on old hardware to interesting places.
Freezedream is the stage name of Australian composer and performer Nathan Stanley, who’s live performances involve pairing up a couple of Sega Mega Drives and routing them through a piece of software called VGX Live. This allows him to create ROM files of the same variety that would be found on a standard Mega Drive cartridge. This software was built, in his own words, “by my genius coding friend Alex Cichowski”, and it enables Stanley to manipulate the classic console’s Yamaha sound chip, effectively turning it into a primitive synthesizer.
“I wanted to make my own sounds as far back as I can remember,” explains Stanley, describing his childhood. “My family bought a secondhand Amiga 500 and later an Amiga 2000. On those computers I could create music with up to four instruments playing at the same time, using sound samples of anything from real instruments to synthesizers to vocals and sound effects.” Indeed, the Amiga computers were something of an auditory revelation when they first came out, with a number of early industrial/hardore artists, such as EC8OR, using the Amiga 500 to generate all of their music.
Most importantly, however, the Amiga was the birthplace of the music tracker, a type of software that allowed users to place musical notes at certain points on a chronological line, often represented by a combination of letters, numbers and hexadecimal code. This was revolutionary for a number of reasons, but chief among them was composers could now create songs on a computer without any knowledge of programming. Many of your favourite video game soundtracks of the 16-bit era owe their very existence to this innovation and it’s still the method of choice for composing music for old hardware.